


All Trains Are Going Local

by levendis



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alien Sex, Breathplay, Dom/sub, F/M, Handcuffs, Role Reversal, Rope Bondage, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-12
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-03-07 08:24:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3168119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Turnabout is fair play.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Trains Are Going Local

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Switched](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3146768) by [capalxii](https://archiveofourown.org/users/capalxii/pseuds/capalxii). 



Clara Oswald is not an expert in xenosexuality. This isn’t a fact about herself she ever thought she’d have to confront. She’s happy she fell in with an alien who was basically human, with bells on; the Doctor could have had two heads or two dicks or no dicks at all, or a requirement to be completely immersed in milk during orgasm, or whatever, and this would be much more complicated.  
  
The Doctor has a much broader but also much shallower understanding of human sexuality. It’s like he knew someone once who read a book about sex, which might actually be literally true, technically. He’s a fast learner, though, and she’s a good teacher, and it turns out his mechanical aptitude combined with a hands-on approach to problem solving translates well to making her come.  
  
Time Lord/human pairings have been successful before, but she’s sort of his first lover, and there’s the two thousand years of experience he has on her, and it was a delicate operation, kickstarting this thing. They follow each other’s lead. They’re so careful at first, tiptoeing around the initial jump from friends to friends with snogging, and then to full-on, no-way-back sexual partners. He has his touch aversion and she has her need to get things Just Right. They have their joint inability to communicate. Eventually, she gets him where she wants him, and she is where she assumes he wants her. As baffling and difficult as their relationship can be, this at least is simple.

She likes to think she would have been happy with anything he was able to give her. But the first time he let her kiss him properly was a knot untangling in her stomach, and the first time she felt him growing hard underneath her was a hallelujah. She might have been happy without this but she’d be lying if she said she wouldn’t miss it if it were gone. Being this close to someone feels good. Being this close to him, after all they’ve been through, feels amazing. It’s a second chance for the both of them, and on a crasser note, regularly-scheduled fucking does wonders for her stress levels.

 

* * *

 

  
There’s a moment where it finishes falling into place, in a way she isn’t quite expecting.  
  
He gets himself locked up. She, of course, has to save the day on her own. It’s fine, she’s good, the locals give her a beautiful necklace in gratitude, she’s deeply touched even if it does look like the sort of thing which, if life were a fantasy novel, would be an ancient cursed artifact.  
  
The cell is small and brightly-lit, and he’s handcuffed and cabled to the wall. Hair mussed, jacket a bit grubby and torn up, but otherwise in decent shape. He looks - good. He looks like he’s not going anywhere. She likes it. She’s seen him in this sort of situation before, but that was before they started fucking. Now she has the luxury of entertaining the thoughts running through her mind.  
  
"Took you long enough," he grumbles. "Did you get lost, or just distracted by something shiny?" He’s squirming a little against the restraints, trying and failing to stand up.  
  
"Hi there," she says. "Having fun?" She crouches down beside him, giving him the Look. By now she knows she has to be obvious, knows she has to project her interest as best as she can. She’s projecting very, very hard.  
  
He’s scowling, but something’s making him keep his mouth shut. And there’s something the scowl is masking. He is, she thinks, playing along.  
  
This is a new possibility, and she needs it ASAP. Not here, obviously. This is a jail on an alien planet, and there are cameras pointed at them. Exhibition isn’t one of her kinks, as far as she knows. So she signals to the guard, and she signs him out, and practically drags him back to the TARDIS.  
  
She’s reasonably certain she isn’t misreading him, but just in case: “I wanna tie you up and fuck you senseless,” and “Does that sound like something you might be interested in?” She holds up the handcuffs she may have nicked off the guard’s desk.  
  
"You humans and your overly-complicated mating rituals," he says, but the expression on his face is unmistakeable. So is the sharp intake of breath when she pulls his arms behind his back and cuffs him to the railing, and the way his posture relaxes, a hint of the old loose-limbed, rag-doll, bow-tied grace. Most obviously, the fact that he’s hard before she’s even touched him.  
  
She drags a fingernail along the length of his erection, scraping audibly against the straining fabric, eliciting the most fantastic gasp and a shameless hip thrust.  “Now now,” she tuts. “Behave.” She grins; he moans helplessly.

 

* * *

  
  
It’s a high, it really is, saving the world. Narrowly escaping death, running as fast as she can, holding the fate of the universe in the palm of her hand. It’s mad and it’s terrifying and it is, she realizes abstractly, somewhat problematic. Loving this as much as she does, what does that say about her? But there’s always the Doctor’s outstretched hand, everything she’s feeling reflected in his eyes. The reasons she’d had for wanting to stop falling further and further away from memory.  
  
She pushes herself to her limits, and pushes the Doctor to his: in the safety of the TARDIS, or her apartment, she takes everything he has to offer, and then asks for more. That blood-buzz adrenaline rush lingering, carrying her forward, the momentum of this. Crushing her mouth against his, pouring the whole of herself onto his lap. Crushing her body against his, like she wants to grind him into dust. Like there is a particular surrender she is looking for. The natural trajectory, the irresistible pull of gravity, the collision course.  
  
All his confidence and competence, how sure his hands are on the TARDIS controls, how he barely pauses to consider he might not beat whatever threat they’re facing. The brusqueness and arrogance, and she’s had him shaking and breaking apart beneath her. The man who can’t stop talking, she’s fucked him speechless. She’s undressed him, unmade him, had him begging and saying her name like it was a prayer. This impossible, ancient man, Time’s Champion, the keeper of the legacy of Rassilon, he’s _hers_. Not bad for a schoolteacher.  
  
No one knows. They’d never understand - she barely understands it herself - what this is, what they do, how any of this feels. The chemical mess of affection, exhilaration, obsession, lust. How well they fit together, despite how little sense it makes; how the fact that it doesn’t make sense is part of the appeal. She’s never been one for destiny, romance-novel fate - it’s such a cliche, the idea of a soulmate, and Danny will always be too much a part of her for it to not seem dishonest. But still: she feels sometimes like a key in a lock, like the answer to a question.  
  
And if maybe he looks like there’s something he’s not saying, and if he stays resolutely gentle regardless of how rough she wants him, and if she occasionally gets the sense he just wants her to slow down. If there’s still a sort of melancholy about him. Well, there’s plenty of time to let the situation sort itself out. Besides, he’s in no position to judge.

 

* * *

  
  
What happens when he stops breathing is he begins breathing in a different way. Something to do with tubes, a secondary respiratory system, a controllable porousness of skin. This is one of the redundancies Time Lords gave themselves. He is a construct, he’d said to her once. A marvel of modern engineering. She occasionally forgets he’s an alien; that had not been one of those times.  
  
She remembers the child she had met, the boy who would become the Doctor. Frightened and alone, hiding from the thing he’d been built for. She wonders if she can see that boy in the man he is now, or if it’s just a trick of the light. She wonders if she can see the being in the man-shaped shell he wears around.  
  
What happens when he stops breathing is a flush that has nothing to do with oxygen deprivation. A trembling that’s only partially due to his body rerouting its essential functions, something foreign pulsing alongside tendons and veins. Her hands on his neck are mostly for show. This is his action to perform. It’s his pace she’s following. His mumbled but specific request, his overly-detailed biology lesson delivered to allay her fears about, you know, accidentally killing him.  
  
She occasionally forgets he’s an alien, but this is not one of those times. His pupils are blown, and what little iris is visible has turned an impossibly bright blue. He’s cold under her hands, cold even inside her. He’s unraveling himself for her, giving her this peculiar set of tremors, these wordless murmurs in too many tones at once. He is consciously dismantling and reassembling himself for her, showing her the skull beneath the skin. Trusting her with this strangeness, this knowledge of the creature he has always been.  
  
She feels honored or maybe just scared, and unwilling to examine whether she’s capable of carrying this part of him the way she carries the rest. Three years ago she’d had a regular life, and a year ago she’d had a regular boyfriend, and now she’s here, having a kind of perplexed orgasm due to frankly bonkers sexual stimuli. Now she’s here, she’s here. Feeling something shift slightly inside her heart.

 

* * *

  
  
The first time it’s different, they’re in her apartment. A load of laundry on, since the TARDIS washing machines leave her clothing unacceptably starchy, and it had been a day of quite a lot of mud. She’s freshly showered and cozied up in a bathrobe (the nice one, the silk one that makes her boobs look good). He’s wearing the same damn jumper he’s been wearing for the past week straight. The hipster-hobo one, with the holes. He probably thinks it makes him look cool.  
   
It’s raining, she’s lit candles, it’s all terribly romantic. She’s about to ask if she can bring out the Special Fancy Sex Candle (because she really does love the marks the wax leaves, and the hiss of pain/pleasure it draws out of him) when he takes her hands and holds them as if they were small birds, with which he must be very careful.  
  
She doesn’t feel half as delicate as he seems to think she is.  
  
"Let’s try something new," he says. "Please." Wide-eyed, eyebrows demonstrating remarkable restraint.  
  
This used to be the default, or at least a common exception, and when had that changed? He’s guiding her gently to her bedroom, and to her bed. On her back, the scattershot energy spilling out from him a familiar, comforting hum. Only it’s tempered, now. Held together and held back. He reverentially pulls her robe open, and kisses the scar on her belly she got climbing over a fence when she was ten, and whispers something she doesn’t quite catch against the soft, shivering skin of her inner thigh. He takes his clothes off exactly as goofily and unseductively as always, because he’s 2,000 years old and his arms still get stuck in the sleeves of things.  
  
And why is this making her so much more nervous than anything else they’ve done? She pulls it together, of course, she always does. One practiced squeeze around his cock and he’s lost the plot, she takes the upper hand again. He looks almost disappointed, almost sad, before it’s gone beneath the waves of predictable noises, the usual O-face. Like this isn’t what he’d wanted, not at all, despite how obviously thirsty he is for it.  
  
Well, fuck what he wants. She is who she is. He should know that by now.

 

* * *

  
  
The second time it’s different, or at least the second time she’s noticed that it’s different, they’re in the TARDIS library. She has half a plan to fuck him against a bookshelf, or maybe bend him over the back of one of the couches. The couch thing, she decides, when he absentmindedly takes his coat off and tosses it in a dusty corner; his waistcoat frames his arse well. That red-satin plumage, she can’t resist. She bookmarks the memoir she hadn’t really been reading and lays it on a rickety side-table, goes to grab his wrists.  
  
But he’s pulling away. “I can’t,” he says. “Not like this. Not now.” His tone is apologetic but determined.  
  
"Like what?" she asks. She chooses to interpret the slight vertigo passing through her as sexual frustration. "Tell me what you want, I can’t read your mind."  
  
"You can’t?" Or maybe he said something else. For some reason, she’s not quite sure. "Let. Let me slow us down, okay?"  
  
He looks ridiculously earnest. So, she relents. Stands still as he edges towards her, one hand raised; fights the odd urge to flinch at how delicately he cups her face, thumb stroking her cheek. He tucks an errant strand of hair behind her ear and just - looks at her.  
  
"What? What is it? Something stuck in my teeth?"  
  
"No," he says quietly, and shrugs. "Just the usual. I’ve been running for centuries, it’s-" He thinks better of whatever it was he’d been about to say, gives her the quickest blink-and-you’ll-miss-it rueful smile, then bends down to kiss her. Softly, undemanding. He puts a hand on her shoulder, leans his forehead against hers. A question is being asked.  
  
"Okay," she says, more confidently than she feels. "Just don’t go rummaging around."  
  
"In what? The human mental landscape is like a dentist’s waiting room overrun by stray cats. The temptation to ‘rummage’ is minimal." He’s being a jerk, because that’s what he does, but the words behind the words, or the non-words, or the -    
  
She doesn’t have the vocabulary for this.  
  
 _The shadow-tongue_ , he provides, in Gallifreyan she understands outside the bounds of the TARDIS translation matrix. Something like ‘ish’: it’s a paraphrase, imprecise at best. There are levels, layers to his language she cannot grasp. It’s frustrating. She feels the leading edge of a defensive quip forming, the machinations of her own thought processes brought into high relief. A reassurance is being made: she is not inadequate. Her human understanding and reinterpretation and reframing of this in her own terms is not a failure. She is listening, that is enough.  
  
He’s sliding deeper, enveloping her, allowing her to envelop him. Embracing, intermingling, the hand that holds the hand that holds the hand that holds the -  
  
The universe is opened to her. The universe is made known. He is making himself known, and he is showing her - she doesn’t know what he’s showing her. He tries again: a series of impressions, not-quite-metaphors. A color she’s never seen before. Ozone, sharp and bitter on her tongue. Birdsong. Genetic profiles. The ghost of a new sensory organ, a physical understanding of time. Herself, as he perceives her, the fundamental Clara-ness of Clara Oswald. An intimacy that does not quite belong to lovers, or friends, or family. Another sort of relationship entirely. What they are.  
  
Gradually, carefully, reluctantly, he withdraws. Trailing fragments of emotions, leaving her with his love and his devotion and a desire that is half sexual, half something else entirely. A request is being made.  
  
"Oh," she says. "Um."  
  
The expression of hope and fear on his face is almost more than she can bear, so she does the one thing she can think of doing, which is hug him as hard as she can. “I’ll think about it,” she says.

 

 

* * *

 

  
The third time it’s different, and the first time she stops using that word and categorizes it as a regular, accepted occurrence. The third time, she’s not even sure she wants to touch him. Not like she usually does. She’s tired of the fever pitch, tired of hurting him, tired of that dumb heartbroken look he always gets, no matter how much he seems to enjoy it; tired of what they’ve turned this into. She’s just - she’s tired.  
  
Not tired of him, of course. She doesn’t think she’ll ever run out of things to find interesting about the Doctor. And if she ever does manage to get bored, he’ll probably whip out another Fun Fact about himself, like if he concentrates real hard he can grow extra testicles, or something. No, it’s a general exhaustion, a bone-deep thing, the sort of feeling that usually has her burrowing under blankets with a party-size cheese tray and her Netflix queue. Usually. Now, he’s here, his hand outstretched.  
  
He’s been telling her all this time that she didn’t need to change. Maybe he’s wrong. Or maybe this is something that’s been inside her all along.  
  
She tells him, she says, flatly, undramatically, she says “I’m tired.” And, “I want. I dunno what I want. Something else, I think.”  
  
"That’s okay," he says. "It’s alright to not know, sometimes." He’s doing that thing again, with the soft eyes and the hand on her cheek. "I have an offer, which you are obviously 100% free to decline."  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"Let me show you what you’ve shown me. Let me return the gift."  
  
"Oh," she says. " _Oh_.” He means the Thing, or whatever his version of it is. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not sure.” Not sure if she wants it, not sure if she can, not sure of much at all right now. The honesty of that statement a weight lifting from her shoulders, and another weight settling in its place.  
  
"If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. No harm no foul. But please let me try. I want you to let me try." The emphasis placed on ‘please’ and ‘want’: this is her decision, as much as it’s ever been. "Do you trust me?"  
  
She wants to make some flippant remark, _not with the tea, I don’t_ , a joke to draw his attention away from her answer, something to lighten the mood. But he doesn’t deserve that. This moment does not deserve that. She bites her lip, and nods.  
  
Apparently satisfied, he steps back, shoves his hands in his pockets. Eyes bright and held unrelenting on hers. “I would never willingly hurt you. I’d never ask you to do anything you weren’t comfortable with. Not unless it’s life or death, you know, an end-of-the-world-type situation.”  
  
"No danger of the apocalypse happening right now, I hope?"  
  
"No, no. Well, there’s always - no." He produces, from seemingly nowhere, a coil of thin rope and a gleaming set of safety shears. The scissors held up for inspection, reassurance, _I can get you out at any time_ , then tucked into his coat pocket. He joins her on the bed. “Hold out your hands,” he says. “Palms up.” Unspoken: _please._  
  
Slowly, she does.  
  
He lays the rope across her wrists, eyes still trained on hers: he’s waiting for her to back out. She won’t, and he should know that by now. Carefully, assuredly, he loops the rope around her arms, tying a knot with deft fingers.  
  
Hands on her hips, he guides her to face the headboard. The length of rope in his hand, he stands up and walks around to face her. Gauging her reaction as he pulls the slack, just enough to bring her arms up and shoulders forward, and ties the rope around the metal frame.  
  
She inhales, exhales. Mindful breathing. She feels the mattress dip behind her, then his hands ghosting along her sides, passing another rope beneath her breasts. Made secure but not tight, his knuckles against her back, fingertips, the hemp sliding smoothly over her skin. Back over her ribs, above her chest, his thumb just barely brushing her nipple. Another few loops, tenderly, slowly. The binding flat and neat on her skin. Every so often a kiss pressed between her shoulder blades.  
  
"A harness," he says, as he brings the rope back under her arms.  
  
"Like for a dog?"  
  
"Like for a you. Or a me, later, if you pay attention and promise not to cut my circulation off."  
  
Another rope, fastened between her breasts and brought over her shoulders, pulled down behind her. A tug, a knot, bringing together the two sets of loops. She feels - she feels framed, on display, somehow more naked than average nudity feels. He’s running his fingers along his handiwork, lingering at her neck, her collarbone.  
  
"Alright?" he asks.  
  
"I think so, yeah."  
  
With a strength that doesn’t quite make sense, considering the size and shape of him, he picks her up and settles her face-down in the mattress. Palms soft but firm on her ankles. Her legs are being bent. A third rope - how many does he have and where are they coming from? - around and between her knees. One last line, running from her back to her legs to presumably the foot of the bed.  
  
"Lark’s head," he says suddenly. "From the French. Tête d’alouette." In presumably his best French accent, which isn’t spectacular. "I’ve always liked that phrase. The songbird’s knot. Apropos, don’t you think?"  
  
She can’t move. She can’t move and he’s talking about etymology. “I can’t move,” she says. “And I don’t care about the technical words for what you’re doing.”  
  
"You not moving is kind of the point. And there’s no excuse to not broaden your vocabulary." His weight is suddenly gone from behind her, and she hears a chair being scraped over the floor, next to the bed, where she can see him. He sits down. "I know you like the lights on. Truthfully, so do I. But tonight, I think-" He snaps his fingers; the overhead lamps turn off, leaving only the soft blue glow of the roundels on the walls.  
  
"Clap on, clap off," she says shakily.  
  
He grins. The dim light glinting off his teeth, the whites of his eyes, his belt buckle. “That is the theme of the evening, yes.” He’s toying with the sonic screwdriver, turning it over and over in his hands. “Do you know, honestly, I’m sick of this thing. Our love affair has faded, I’m afraid. It is good in some situations, though.” He thumbs through settings, the pitch-shifting whine and buzz. “Certain tasks, those requiring a distance from the subject.”  
  
She can’t move. She can’t stop staring at him, his Adam’s apple bobbing above his high-buttoned collar as he swallows. She feels more naked than average nudity with him sitting there fully-dressed, pressed and combed and orderly. She’s stripped bare, and he’s pointing the screwdriver at her.  
  
And - nothing, at first. Or maybe something. A tingle along her spine: is that her or the screwdriver? She feels goosebumps forming. Hair standing on end, an electric breath sliding over her skin. Pin-pricks, almost. A field, a swarm, gathering at her waist and inching down, past her thighs, the crooks of her knees, calves. Between her toes. And, goddamn him, tickling the arches of her feet. She won’t laugh, she won’t. “I thought it didn’t do organics,” she chokes out.  
  
"I made a few modifications. And it’s still not doing anything _to_ you, just-” He gestures expansively. “Around you.”  
  
The swarm expands, surrounding her. She thinks she can see his hand shaking where it’s resting on the chair’s arm. Fingers flexing, maybe. That look of detached curiosity occasionally betraying something else, almost. Eventually she relaxes, and closes her eyes. Lets her mind wander. She thinks: this is not what he feels. Those expressions she’s memorized, the base physical ecstasy, this does something to him that it doesn’t do to her. It’s not arousal, what she’s feeling. Once the nerves and half-panic finally leave. Once she stops fighting it, and stops fighting the urge to fight it. She feels warm, held. After a while she stops thinking altogether. She loses track of time, of herself, of anything other than the essential facts of rope and buzz and him.  
  
The swarm narrows, not a swarm at all anymore. It’s, what. She has no analogue for this. It is what it is and it’s sweeping over her. A hand that’s not a hand is cradling her head, is massaging her back. A hand with too many fingers - not fingers as such - haptic pressure splitting and snaking, curling around her body. Her nipples stiffen under the attention of a not-mouth. Her hips raise off the bed, as much as they can, then rock down again, searching desperately for friction. She finds herself pulling hard on the ropes, straining, sweating; the electronic idea of what wind is, drying broad strokes across her.  
  
She opens her eyes. He’s staring at her, an expression on his face she’s never seen before, a look she can’t place. The screwdriver’s drone dips to a low, rumbling harmony. He flicks his wrist.  
  
There’s a noise - she’s making it - a thousand probing touches crowding down against her clit - she’s crying out and they’re whispering, singing back to her, and she’s coming.  
  
She doesn’t realize she’s being untied until it’s done. He’s lying down next to her, face to face. Rubbing the marks left on her wrists. They’re snuggling, nearly.  
  
"I feel like I’ve been fucked by a holographic octopus."  
  
He raises an eyebrow, purses his lips. “I suppose that’s as good an analogy as any,” he says. “But it doesn’t necessarily require one. Not everything needs a name.”  
  
"You’re just saying that because no one can pronounce yours." She grins, drops a quick kiss on the tip of his nose.  
  
"Ha ha." He frowns, grumping obligingly. "Ha," he says again.  
  
She leans her forehead against his. Tentatively, she sends out what she hopes is a feeler. Knocking on his door, as it were. Something like surprise, a smile. One of them is grateful, maybe both. One of them is sighing contentedly, stretching, sleepily caressing the other. Maybe both.  
  
 _We,_ he provides. _The word you’re looking for is ‘we’. Idiot._  
  
 _Shut up._ Can you slap someone mentally? Is that a thing? She’ll find out later. Right now, she’s got a nap to take.  
  
As she drifts off she hears, possibly, a song being sung.


End file.
